Poker Strategy

Welcome to our strategy section of the UK Poker Player site. Here you can browse all our articles written for players of all skill levels to help improve their game, we add new articles often so be sure to check back or sign up for our newsletter to be kept up to date on all things poker related.

Poker strategy be it for online poker or it’s live counterpart is an essential part of becoming a winning poker player. We aim to introduce you to high quality poker strategy articles which will see your game progress to a higher level.

Manage Your Poker Bankroll Managing your bankroll is something all UK poker players should not need reminding about, but it is remarkable the number of times that players just dip into a higher stake level to get back some of the funds they lost at a previous table. Ironically, the worst thing that can happen is not that you ...

Online Distractions When Playing Poker Playing online poker requires the same amount of discipline and focus as if you were playing in a live event. Even the best online poker players will have bad sessions when they approach a game or tournament with the wrong attitude, and having too many distractions while playing online poker could do your bankroll more ...

Re-Buy & Add-On Tournaments Poker tournaments which follow the re-buy and add-on format tend to attract a lot of players on the basis of generous guarantees offered by the online poker rooms hosting the games. At the start of a game you may well find some of these tournaments very much undersubscribed, but due to late registrations and “second ...

Loose Online Poker Cash Games Looking for loose online poker cash games? Well look no further that the WSOP.co.uk where the vast majority of players are there to try and luck their way to the World Series and seem to have little or no understanding of any strategy at all!
The loosest of all games seem to be the no limit ...

Poker ROI You may have seen the term “ROI” and wondered what it possibly meant and how it reflected on your poker profitability. Poker ROI stands for “Return on Investment” and is most frequently used to calculate how well you are performing in Sit ´n´ Go tournaments. It is a personal gauge, and although freely available to ...

The Pros and Cons of Late Registration There is a growing popularity on many online poker sites to allow late registration after a multi table poker tournament has commenced. Sometimes this late registration can be up until the first break, and enables players to join a game when half of the original entrants may have already been eliminated. Inasmuch as this is ...

Online Poker Table Selection For a game in which profitability is heavily reliant on skill, it might seem a little crazy to suggest that one of the most influential factors that can affect that profitability is picking the right table to sit at. However, inasmuch as your choice of seat will have little control over the cards that are ...

An Introduction to Multi-Tabling Multi-tabling is the current buzzword in online poker. Playing multiple poker games at the same time has its advantages, but it can also lead you into difficulty if you get involved in too many difficult decisions at the same time. Inasmuch as you will be stacking up the bonuses and rakeback the more tables you ...

Omaha Poker Betting Rules Omaha Poker is a very different game from Texas Hold’em Poker in the respect that a greater emphasis is put on maths and outs in Omaha, and there are fewer opportunities to bluff your opponents. Nonetheless, Omaha Poker betting rules are much the same as you will find in the more popular version of poker, ...

Dealing With a Hand Weakness Players at all levels of poker have a weakness with a certain combination of cards in their hand. This is most noticeable when novice players get involved in hands that contain an ace with a low kicker, but can also apply to intermediate players who go ga-ga over pocket queens and even the great Phil ...

Position, Opponent, Cards. The POC rule (Position, Opponent, Cards) is an exceptionally important one when it comes to success at playing in multi table poker tournaments. It is a thought progression that should be used every time it is your turn to act, and is the order in which every player should be considering their options.
There are some ...

Tips for Playing in Large Fields When players first start competing in online multi table poker tournaments it is normally on one of the major sites, with a low buy-in, a field of thousands competing for a first prize of a couple of hundred dollars and a deep payout structure.
Poker sites like providing these sorts of games, as it encourages the ...

Buying in For The Maximum If you play any form of online ring game poker, you will have noticed an alarming tendency for players to arrive at a table with the minimum number of chips possible and then “rathole” any winnings they have made (ratholing is when a player leaves the table with their winnings and returns a short time ...

How to Crush a Loose Table There are a number of online web sites which are notorious for the loose standard of their players (see our 888 poker review for one) but sometimes a tight aggressive player can find that they experience more losing sessions on a loose site than on their regular tables. Stories of how premium cards get crushed ...

How to Play Two Pairs Conventional wisdom decrees that if you hit two pairs on the flop, you bet out to take the pot there and then and prevent anybody picking up a stronger hand with the late community cards – but there are some circumstances in which you may have to show a little caution.
In the low stakes games, ...

Tips for Poker Satellites Whichever poker site you play on, they are full of satellite multi table poker tournaments offering qualification for a major event or large stake game, and there is often the temptation is to enter these on the strength of the potential prize in the target event. However, there are a number of factors that you ...

How to Play Against a Bluffer One of the more valuable benefits of regularly taking notes, is that when you arrive at a table, you already know most of the betting actions of the opponents you are about to face. Sometimes this can help determine which table you actually play on as, if you have a history of taking money from ...

The Vulnerability of KK When you are dealt pocket Kings in NL Texas Hold´em, you should give careful thought to how you intend to play them. You want to make as much profit from the hand as possible, yet cannot risk allowing too many players into the pot – particularly any holding aces that might catch top pair on ...

Protecting Your Stack Whereas there is plenty of advice available for players who find themselves short-stacked in a multi table poker tournament, there seems to be little guidance on offer for players who have started a tournament well and find themselves up amongst the chip leaders. Maybe the belief exists that players with the biggest chip stacks no ...

Playing the Big Blind Being in the Big Blind position when playing No Limit Texas Hold’em can often present a dilemma. In many cases, you may be happy situation where you can get a free card by checking through, or even picking up the small blind if all the players in front of you fold. However, when there is ...

Playing Low Level No Limit Hold´em Whereas many of the strategy articles that you will find on the Internet and in poker training books will relate to the mid-stakes games, low level no limit hold´em consists of almost a different breed of player – not necessarily worse players, just significantly contrasting in the way that they play the game to those ...

Putting Your Poker Opponent on a Range How would you play your cards if you were able to determine what your opponent was holding? The usual answer to this question is “more profitably”, but without cheating or having X-ray spectacles it is unlikely that you will never know for sure until the showdown. There is however one way in which you can ...

Short Handed and Short Stacked With it being high season for live UK Poker Tournaments, we have been looking at some of the major performances during the final table action, and a particularly impressive rearguard action by Roland de Wolfe was one of the highlights of the final days play at the WSOPE in London at the end of September.
De ...

Whats Luck Got to do with it? There is a quote from Brad Gilbert´s book “Winning Ugly” which all poker players should take note of:-
“No matter how hard you work, no matter how great your talent, your mind is the ultimate weapon. Most players use it against themselves… when you are the master of your mind, you will master the art of ...

Odds and Sods Knowing your odds of making a top hand in Texas Hold´em Poker is one of the ways of ensuring that you are a profitable player in the long term. If you know that three times out of four you are going to win a hand, then it makes it worth playing every time, because for ...

Make the Most of the MTT Doldrums The Doldrums is an area of water a few degrees either side of the equator where trade winds converge and their subsequent calmness could trap sailing ships for weeks before they could continue on their voyage.
Sometimes this inactivity would drive sailors crazy, whilst others used the time wisely to prepare for their journey home. The ...

Check Raising Strategy Check/Raising is a potentially lucrative poker strategy when applied in the right circumstances. It requires that you have a good idea about the betting tendencies of players on the table behind you in the betting and should only be used in situations when you have a very strong hand.
The concept behind the strategy is that ...

Best Way To Play Pocket Aces There is a lot of debate about the right way to play AA in Texas Hold´em poker, with notable figures such as Phil Hellmuth and Doyle Brunson advocating going all-in after a re-raise, and Dan Harrington and Randy Ray suggesting that it is better to increase the value of the pot first without driving everyone ...

Size Matters When players come to a ring game short-stacked it is frequently a sign that they are cautious about the amount of money they are prepared to lose or may lack confidence in their abilities.
The excuse that it is good bankroll management is a load of tosh, because if what they brought to the table ...

Bankroll Management and Porridge Sometimes you get to a poker table and you can sense something is inherently wrong. In much the same way as Father Bear returned from his walk in the story of Goldilocks to discover somebody had been eating his porridge, even though you are in the right place – things around you do not seem ...

Passive Poker Players are YOU one? In the same way that we all have a mixture of x and y chromosomes in our biological make-up, nobody is a completely passive player. However, it is better to know what constitutes passivity, so you are able to identify it in yourself, see it in other players and know what the benefits, or otherwise, ...

Basic Sit n Go Poker Strategy One format of poker which is particularly popular online is the Single Table Tournament, or “Sit ´n´ Go” (also abbreviated to STT or SnG). These games are played from low stakes of $0.10 up to $2.000 per player, short-handed or on a full table, and for any variety of game from Texas Hold´em to the ...

Seven Card Stud Odds and EV Calculating your odds of completing a winning hand in Seven Card Stud is a more reliable than in Hold´em or Omaha because you get to see more open cards as the hand proceeds. You also get to see the likely odds of another player holding the cards that are required to beat your hand, so ...

Leveraging Your Bets Leveraging your betting in Texas Hold´em means placing a bet that implies you will be increasing your betting activity in stages all the way through to the final rounds of the hand, and makes an opponent hesitate when calling your bet because he has to calculate how much it is going to cost him to ...

Fish That Bite Back One of the most common grumbles about playing online at some of the less populated poker rooms, particularly those noted for a high percentage of loose players, is that the RNG is fixed in the favour of the less experienced players and there are a high percentage of bad turns on the river.
This is complete ...

Sex, Drugs ´n´ Rock ´n´ Roll Playing poker can be a very stressful game, and there are times when you have to get away from it all, chill out and give your mind a chance to stop working on pot odds and identifying characteristics of players around your table.
These top tips may help you approach your game in a better mood ...

Basic MTT Strategy Seeing as it’s that time of Year when there are some great online tournaments on offer and of course gukpt satellites, here’s some basic MTT Poker strategy which may be of use.
Multi-Table Tournaments can range in size from two tables to over two thousand tables, can be played live or online and follow either a ...

Poker Intuition and Gut Feeling Intuition, or your “gut feeling”, can turn a hand of poker around for you when you use it in conjunction with the knowledge you have acquired about the game and the dynamics of the table on which you are playing. It can be your best friend when you get it right or your worst enemy ...

Differences Between Live and Online There are some big differences between playing poker online and going into a casino or club to play – and even if you excel at one, it does not necessarily mean you will do well at the other.
The major difference playing online is the anonymity that you enjoy at the computer screen. You can be ...

Playing Tight? Loosen Up a Little! There is a point that you come to in Texas Hold´em poker, where you feel you have the balance just right in respect of knowing when to fold your cards. It takes a lot of time, effort and experience to get there – and then you find that you are never winning any money.
It may ...

Play Money to Real Money Poker Making the transition from play chips to playing for money can be a huge shock for some players. Inasmuch as it is recommended that you always start your poker education in an arena that has no chance of collateral damage, at some stage the desire to step up to the cash ring tables and real ...

What’s Behind a Raise at The Poker Table? Raising is an integral part of playing any form of poker, but it is especially important in No Limit and Pot Limit games that you comprehend the psychology behind raising, and the message that you are sending to other players.
Winning poker players are generally well balanced players with an aggressive streak available when required. That ...

Do You Play Poker To Win? In sport, participating and being a good loser is sometimes seen as a virtuous quality. It won’t get you very far in poker! Whether or not you think that poker is a sport, the aim is still to win, and there are far too many players out there who are playing “not to lose”.
Sit and ...

Setting Your Goals When Playing Poker Although every time you enter a poker room, the goal is to leave with more than you came in with, we have to accept that it is not going to happen every single time. That is why we have “Meta-goals”.
A Meta-goal exists because we are all natural born optimists (we would not be playing poker ...

Debunking Poker Systems and Ebooks Once you have registered with a number of different poker web sites, word seems to get around that you are a prolific poker player, and you get an enormous amount of junk mail coming through your email. Many of these are from the poker companies themselves, which is okay as you do not want to ...

Mixed Poker Game Strategies Around the online poker sites, there are a number of mixed game options for players. HORSE is the most popular, being an acronym for Hold´em, Omaha Hi/Lo, Razz, Stud and Stud Hi/Lo (8´s or better), but there are several others, including Full Tilt Poker´s recent re-arrangement of this series called HEROS. Inasmuch as the latter ...

The Implications of Time Difference It may seem crazy or worrisome to anybody who knows you, but if you regularly play poker on one of the web sites that accept American players, it might be a good idea to set the alarm, get out of bed early and get onto your computer for a game of poker.
No doubt that ...

Choosing an Online Poker Screen Name? All the way through our formative years, it has been drummed into us that “you do not get a second chance to make a first impression”. Yet, when you sit down at your next online poker game, just take a look at some of the names around you. How can some of these people ever ...

Pre-Flop Madness In Pot Limit Poker If you frequently play Pot Limit poker of any variety, you may have witnessed a phenomenon known as pre-flop madness. It is unique inasmuch as it rarely seems to occur in No-Limit games, and could not possibly happen in Fixed-Limit.
However, there seems to be a switch that is activated in players´ heads when they first ...

Obtaining Information From Opponents Poker is not only a game of skill with the element of luck in there but its about having the ability to be able to extract and absorb information from your opponents that are seated around you.
Just imagine if you had enough information from each player that is seated at the table with you, so ...

How Poker Mentality Can Cost You Poker is a game that requires a lot of concentration as well as determination, giving a player the opportunity to know when they are just in a small glitch as the cards run dry or whether their losses account to more than poor cards.
A poker player can only be successfully if they are fully analytical ...

Rebuy Poker Tournament Strategy There are advantages and disadvantages to playing in rebuy/add-on multi-table tournaments depending on what style of player you are and how much value these games represent to you.
The R/A tournaments offer the opportunity to add to your stack of chips should you make a poor start to the competition by paying a further entry to ...

The Gap Concept The Gap Concept is a term first introduced by David Slanksky in his book “The Theory of Poker” – one of the first comprehensive guides to playing poker, published well before the boom of the online poker rooms, and regarded as many current stars of the game as a “poker bible”.
The theory behind the Gap ...

Coping with Reverse Tilt Poker is much more fun when you are winning, but just like in other games, when you are winning all the time, it gives you a feeling of invincibility and can cause you to lose your focus on what created that winning streak in the first instance. This is known as “Reverse Tilt” and it ...

The Value of Online Poker Satellites The lure of the bright lights of Las Vegas for the World Series of Poker, Monaco for the European Poker Tour and even Margate for the GUKPT, entices players to invest their cash in satellite tournaments to qualify for the Main Events at each of these stunning locations.
However, possibly you might think about how much ...

Understanding Implied Odds Understanding pot odds and the chances that you have of making your hand on the draw is a basic skill in poker. Most players have a good idea about how to calculate probability, or use a piece of poker software to do it for them – then use this information to help them decide whether ...

Selecting the Right Table to Win On When you first enter your poker site, you may well (and correctly) be using the filters in the lobby area to lead you to the tables which fall into the criteria set by your bankroll management, but there may be times when it could be worthwhile extending your focus to other tables outside of this ...

Pros and Cons of Multi Tabling Online multi-tabling is an art form and an acquired skill, and for many people is the only way that they can enjoy their poker. There is a buzz of constant action, instant decisions to be made, tables flashing away at you and clocks ticking down the time you have available.
You can be playing multiple tables ...

Short Handed Poker Strategy The term “short-handed” usually relates to a poker table which contains 6 or less players. In Texas Hold´em, it is a very aggressive game where the best hand does not necessarily win the pots.
A short-handed table is no place for a loose-passive player to be, nor the player who waits too long the premium hands ...

Pre Flop Poker Strategy Your Texas Hold´em pre-flop strategy should be something which you have organised well before the cards are dealt. There are plenty of factors to consider such as how aggressive or passive the players are at the table, your bankroll, your tolerance to risk and, most importantly, your position.
If you have sorted out your minimum opening ...

Basic Bluffing Strategy Bluffing is part of the game of poker that some people have a psychological block against using. Whether it is because there is an element of dishonesty about it, or perhaps the fear of loss is greater than the potential gain, for some reason there are players who just do not feel comfortable with bluffing.
Whatever ...

Odds and Probabilities An Introduction to Odds and Probabilities for Limit Hold’em players.
Odds and probabilities form the basic foundations on which a winning game is built, each and every decision you make at the table, must in some way be influenced by simple math. You don’t need to be a mathematical genius to get to grips with it, ...

Poker Aggression and Unpredictability Most poker players already know a little about aggression. The word is thrown around by poker strategy articles all the time. The basic idea is to play a tight game and then play your strong hands with aggression. That’s a great strategy but remember it’s only a starting point. As you move up in stakes, ...

Maximizing Your Returns from SNGs Sngs are a great way of making money in online poker. Running every couple of minutes in various stakes at the popular poker rooms, Sngs are an increasingly popular variety of game and activity. While most players claim using the right in game strategies will make you successful, the following article offers a few tips ...

Poker, Boredom and Tilt Boredom is a disease and it’s also a common occurrence in Poker. It’s not really something that you can catch from another person as much as it’s something that you can catch from sitting at the same table, playing the same game, for too long.
Boredom can be a poker player’s worst enemy, as it can ...

Find the fishy poker sites As a poker player you want to be playing others who simply are pretty poor at the game, the term poker fish is used to describe a bad or weak player, finding these players should be a priority to us all. So the question we set out to answer is which is the fishiest poker ...

Bad Beat’ An overused term Chalk up another loss at the casino last night. How? Well, we had two cards, and he had two cards, and after the five community cards showed, his were better. Sound like a bad beat? Probably not.
Let’s take a closer look at the hands. We’re playing at the £40 NLHE table where the blinds are ...